A soldier – a man crushed by his superiors, full of repression and guilt – kills the mother of his child. It doesn't sound like a huge story, but Georg Büchner's unfinished play of 1836, inspired by a real-life murder in Leipzig, and written the year before the author died of typhoid aged just 23, has become one of the most influential plays of the last 200 years. Simon Stephens's remarkable 2006 play Motortown, about a soldier retuning from Iraq, owed a strong debt to Büchner's play. A fragment from Woyzeck has found its way into every show by the experimental company Punchdrunk – and The Drowned Man, which opens formally next week, is no exception.

Woyzeck has often been cited at as the first truly modern drama, and has influenced numerous artists, from the composer Alban Berg to playwright Sarah Kane. Sadly there's no video of the latter, but here's the trailer from Carrie Cracknell's English National Opera revival of Berg's Wozzeck, which relocated the opera to a recession-hit UK with the troubled hero returning from duty abroad.

One of the most interesting productions I've ever seen was produced by Cardboard Citizens, a company which works with the homeless. Here's the review, but alas there's no video online. But I've always loved Werner Herzog's hallucinatory 1978 film version with a brilliant Klaus Kinski, as the man accused of "running through the world like an open razor".

The most famed revival of recent years was Robert Wilson's production at the beginning of the decade, which came with songs by Tom Waits. Some claimed it exuded too little despair and too much cabaret chic. Take a look at this clip and make up your own mind.

I haven't caught Josef Nadj's free version of Woyzeck, in which little remains of Büchner's original, but there is something in his clip that makes me think I'd like it very much; it so clearly captures the torment of the man. As Richard Schechner wrote in Notes Towards an Imaginary Production, "how everyone loves to torture Woyzeck, as if his misery is their salvation."

William Kentridge's black-and-white animations are the star of Handspring Puppet Company's Woyzeck on the Highveld, in which Büchner's antihero becomes a black migrant worker in 1950s Johannesburg. The product originated in 1992, but here's a clip from the 2011 revival.